Do you ever dance to music at home (or elsewhere) when no-one is watching?
Photo credit: Jack Thomson
I saw the painting “The Cha Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961″ in the Hockney Exhibition in London 2017. This piece was painted by David Hockney in 1961 and is based on a true event. It incorporates lyrics ‘I love every movement’ from the song Poetry in Motion (1960), and it has the letters QEE (queen ? queer) written on it. It is a heavily queer coded piece of art.
I have danced to music for as long as I can remember (my first memories being dancing to my father’s piano playing ). As a child I would put on records of classical music and create ballets.
At Dartington where I studied my degree in the early 1980’s I would as a music student take my boom box into a dance studio in the evening and just improvise to my cassette tapes.
There is something in the freedom of the title “The Cha Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961″. I love……a dance danced away from a dance space, from a performance space – this interests me. I have a light solo venture called “The Kitchen Dancing Project” that has come into my research masters: “Do you ever dance to music at home (or elsewhere) when no-one is watching?”
I have been wanting to create in my research/teaching spaces the freedom that comes from dancing without inhibition, perhaps revealing an authentic dialogue between the dancer and the music. To be able to switch between the use of technique and the loss of inhibition, therein is a process I want to pursue.
On the night I will create an open Spotify Playlist, we will dance your kitchen dance and then we will talk about what it is that moves you to dance to that track… the music ? what it means to you?
